Reviving old machine

[tomvertommen]

Hello,

I am reviving an old computer. The specs are as follows:

* motherboard: Asus A8V Deluxe
* cpu: Opteron 165
* memory: 2GB
* Hard Disk: 500GB WD Blue (PATA)

it still has an AGP slot for the graphics adapter.

I have an ATI X800XT in there. I is (rather was) a good card, but I would like to try and install Battlefield 3 on this machine. I know it's old and it will never offer great performance, but still...I would like to try it. I need a new GPU, cause this one doesn't support DirectX 10 and that's a requirement to be able to play Battlefield 3.

I was looking at the following cards: HD3850, HD3870 and HD4760.

Can any of you tell me which one would performe better and if there would be any significant difference between those cards. I was especially thinking about the amount of memory on the cards. I noticed you can get a HD4760 with 1GB in comparison to 512MB on both other cards. Would the 1GB obviously be the much option or mayby not ?

I would be playing on medium to low settings and a resolution of something like 1024 * 768 or 1280 * 1024.

Anyone can give me some more information ?

ty

 

[Rustyy117]

Wow, blast from the past!

my concern would be that the CPU would bottleneck even the HD3850.

I take it the Opteron 165 is at its stock 1.8Ghz?

I think it would be a slide show even on the lowest settings.

 

[digitalzom-b]

Does this computer have Windows XP on it? If so, then you would need Windows Vista at a minimum to play BF3 since it requires an OS that supports DX10 and above. Also, I honestly don't think BF3 will run on that system at all even with the best AGP card you can slop in it.

The minimum requirements are as follows:
Windows Vista/Win7, Core2Duo @ 2.4GHz, or an Athlon X2 @2.7Ghz, 2gb RAM (which you do meet... kind of), Radeon 3870 or Nvidia 8800GT video card w/ 512MB of RAM.

So, CPU seems to be the main problem if the OS isn't, and it WILL cause bottlenecking issues as mentioned above. I don't see it happening .

 

[djridonkulus]

No siree. There would be no difference in any of them because they would all equally suck. Even though the minimum specs says 2Gb of ram, there is some issue with BF3 memory leaks that forced me to upgrade from 6 to 12 Gbs of RAM.

That was a very weird issue because my Dual HD5850 seemed to be able to play Ultra settings for the first few matches perfectly and then gradually after that the game grew unplayable with lag. I couldn't do anything to solve it, even setting it to the lowest settings. The problem happened every time and must be cured with a full system reboot which would start the cycle again - 2-3 matches, then reboot...

After upgrading to 12Gb the problem completely disappeared. Running resource monitor, BF3 uses up to 10 Gb of RAM including the "standby" amount and at least 6 Gb not including the standby amount.

Bottom line is that 2Gb might give you the same problems.

 

[tomvertommen]

I saw youtube videos where they play it with those cards, so I think it's doable. I installed windows 7 already.

 

[tomvertommen]

I have another system and I am able to play it fine with 4GB ram...never saw a memory leak tbh. Maybe that's a solved issue ?

 

[digitalzom-b]

It's not the card that's the concern, it's the processor. I honestly have concerns about it running well at all because it is such a low-end processor.

 

[djridonkulus]

I dunno why the memory leak affected me but if you search BF3 memory leak it's happened to others as well. Maybe it's a 64bit thing?

 

[mdsiu]

Proc is not fast enough

 

[digitalzom-b]

Well, the game having a chance of memory leak is no excuse to put more memory in your system. DICE would have to fix that problem, not expect players to upgrade their systems.

 

[whooleo]

If you could overclock your Opteron to at least 2.7GHz you most likely would be able to run it.... barely though. But reading back, overclocking that CPU to 2.7GHz to 3Hz isn't hard.

 

[tomvertommen]

I could try it...I overclocked it before; I have a Zalman 9500 on it.

But then...still...what card should I get ?

 

[whooleo]

The radeon hd 4670 is the fastest AGP card that you can buy but you might have to look on eBay for it.

Correction: the radeon hd 3870 is the fastest but the 4670 uses less power and might be easier to find and cheaper.